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Taking to the streets: Dennis and Sylvia Rosen take a walk around the lesser known monuments to London’s scientific past, some of them well enough hidden to surprise even lifelong Londoners

By DENNIS and SYLVIA ROSEN

There are few better way of getting to know a city than a quiet walk
through the streets. If you find yourself in the West End with a spare half
hour, you should be within a few minutes’ walk of a least one of the areas
the tour covers. The whole walk will take the best part of a morning to
complete.

The tour begins in Regent’s Park (see map p 16). Overlooking the southeast
corner of the park is the 1960s block that houses the Royal College of Physicians
at 11 St Andrew’s Place. In the college garden is a bust of Thomas Linacre,
who founded the institution in 1520, and nearby a blue plaque noting that
the ‘medical naturalist’ Frank Buckland lived in a house on the site during
the 1860s and 1870s.

Buckland qualified in medicine, but his chief interest in nature was
to eat it. He considered everything to be eatable until proved otherwise.
He claimed to have eaten his way right through the animal kingdom and objected
only to earwigs, describing them as being unappetisingly bitter.

He was a keen fly fisherman and he gave up his medical practice to write
columns on fishing for magazines. In 1867 he became the government’s Inspector
of Salmon Fisheries.

The medical connection continues as you leave the park and cross Marylebone
Road. The smart, white, stuccoed Park Crescent was once the home of Joseph
Lister, who lived at number 12. Lister graduated from University College
London (UCL), but then spent more than a quarter of a century in Scotland.
There he began …